Blog posts, the short-and-to the point way I write most of them, compress information significantly. In two or three paragraphs – my self-imposed limit – it is admittedly hard to do justice to complex topics, such as Poisson distributions, post-modernism, McKinsey’s 7S system, or ethnography, to pick some at random that I have tackled, but in 140 Twitter characters even the attempt is a joke. Even so, people visit here ten to twenty times a day from Twitter, and more if someone with a following – a noTweetable person such as Kevin O’Keefe or Ron Friedman – tips their hat to one of my posts and adds a tiny URL.
For general counsel, and much more for the generation on their heels, Twitter and its ilk serve as the canary in the coal mine, the reconnaissance scout deep behind the lines, the town crier of ideas. On June 15, 2009, from 8:45 AM until noon, a dozen people visited my site from Twitter or Twitter-related sites. I think I will go and tweet now.